Edwards Betty. The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

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all of us. A writer uses words, a musician notes, an artist visual

perceptions, and all need some knowledge of the techniques of

their crafts. But a creative individual intuitively sees possibilities

for transforming ordinary data into a new creation, transcendent

over the mere raw materials.

Time and again, creative individuals have recognized the

differences between the two processes of gathering data and

transforming those data creatively. Neuroscience is now illumi-

nating that dual process. I propose that getting to know both sides

of your brain is an important step in liberating your creative

potential.

The Ah-ha! response

In the right-hemisphere mode of information processing, we use

intuition and have leaps of insight—moments when "everything

seems to fall into place" without figuring things out in a logical

order. When this occurs, people often spontaneously exclaim,

"I've got it" or "Ah, yes, now I see the picture." The classic exam-

ple of this kind of exclamation is the exultant cry, "Eureka!" (I

have found it!) attributed to Archimedes. According to the story,

Archimedes experienced a flash of insight while bathing that

enabled him to use the weight of displaced water to determine

whether a certain crown was pure gold or alloyed with silver.

This, then, is the right-hemisphere mode: the intuitive, sub-

jective, relational, holistic, time-free mode. This is also the dis-

dained, weak, left-handed mode that in our culture has been

generally ignored. For example, most of our educational system

has been designed to cultivate the verbal, rational, on-time left

hemisphere, while half of the brain of every student is virtually

neglected.

Half a brain is better than none: A whole brain would

be better

With their sequenced verbal and numerical classes, the schools

you and I attended were not equipped to teach the right-hemi-

sphere mode. The right hemisphere is not, after all, under very

The nineteenth-century mathe-

matician Henri Poincare described

a sudden intuition that gave him

the solution to a difficult problem:

"One evening, contrary to my

custom, I drank black coffee and

could not sleep. Ideas rose in

crowds; I felt them collide until

pairs interlocked, so to speak,

making a stable combination."

[That strange phenomenon pro-

vided the intuition that solved the

troublesome problem. Poincare

continued,] "It seems, in such

cases, that one is present at his own

unconscious work, made partially

perceptible to the overexcited con-

sciousness, yet without having

changed its nature. Then we

vaguely comprehend what distin-

guishes the two mechanisms or, if

you wish, the working methods of

the two egos."

YOUR BRAIN: TI1K RIGHT AND LEFT OF IT

"Approaching forty, I had a singular

dream in which I almost grasped

the meaning and understood the

nature of what it is that wastes in

wasted time."

— Cyril Connolly

The Unquiet Grave: A Word

Cycle by Palinuris, 1945

Many creative people seem to have

intuitive awareness of the sepa-

rate-sided brain. For example,

Rudyard Kipling wrote the follow-

ing poem, entitled "The Two-

Sided Man," more than fifty years

ago.

Much I owe to the lands that grew-

More to the Lives that fed-

But most to the Allah Who gave me

Two

Separate sides to my head.

Much I reflect on the Good and the

True

In the faiths beneath the sun

But most upon Allah Who gave me

Two

Sides to my head, not one.

I would go without shirt or shoe,

Friend, tobacco or bread,

Sooner than lose for a minute the

two

Separate sides of my head!

— Rudyard Kipling

good verbal control. You can't reason with it. You can't get it to

make logical propositions such as "This is good and that is bad,

for a, b, and c reasons." It is metaphorically left-handed, with all

the ancient connotations of that characteristic. The right hemi-

sphere is not good at sequencing—doing the first thing first, tak-

ing the next step, then the next. It may start anywhere, or take

everything at once. Furthermore, the right hemisphere hasn't a

good sense of time and doesn't seem to comprehend what is

meant by the term "wasting time," as does the good, sensible left

hemisphere. The right brain is not good at categorizing and nam-

ing. It seems to regard the thing as-it-is, at the present moment of

the present; seeing things for what they simply are, in all of their

awesome, fascinating complexity. It is not good at analyzing and

abstracting salient characteristics.

Today, educators are increasingly concerned with the impor-

tance of intuitive and creative thought. Nevertheless, school sys-

tems in general are still structured in the left-hemisphere mode.

Teaching is sequenced: Students progress through grades one,

two, three, etc., in a linear direction. The main subjects learners

study are verbal and numerical: reading, writing, arithmetic.

Nowadays, however, seats often are set circles rather than in rows.

Time schedules are more flexible. But learners still converge

on "correct" answers to often-ambiguous questions. Teachers still

give out grades that often are tied to the "bell curve," which guar-

antees that one-third of every group will be judged "below

average," regardless of achievement. And everyone senses that

something is amiss.

The right brain—the dreamer, the artificer, and the artist—is

lost in our school system and goes largely untaught. We might

find a few art classes, a few shop classes, something called "cre-

ative writing," and perhaps courses in music; but it's unlikely that

we would find courses in imagination, in visualization, in percep-

tual or spatial skills, in creativity as a separate subject, in intu-

ition, in inventiveness. Yet educators value these skills and have

apparently hoped that students would develop imagination, per-

ception, and intuition as natural consequences of training in ver-

bal, analytic skills.

THE NEW DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN

Fortunately, such development often does occur almost in

spite of the school system—a tribute to the survival capacity of

creative abilities. But the emphasis of our culture is so strongly

slanted toward rewarding left-brain skills that we are surely los-

ing a very large proportion of the potential ability of the other

halves of our children's brains. Scientist Jerre Levy has said—

only partly humorously—that American scientific training

through graduate school may entirely destroy the right hemi-

sphere. We certainly are aware of the effects of inadequate train-

ing in verbal, computational skills. The verbal left hemisphere

never seems to recover fully, and the effects may handicap stu-

dents for life. What happens, then, to the right hemisphere that is

hardly trained at all?

Perhaps now that neuroscientists have provided a conceptual

base for right-brain training, we can begin to build a school sys-

tem that will teach the whole brain. Such a system will surely

include training in drawing skills—an efficient, effective way to

teach thinking strategies suited to the right brain.

Handedness, left or right

Students ask many questions about left- and right-handedness.

This is a good place to address the subject, before we begin

instruction in the basic skills of drawing. I will attempt to clarify

only a few points, because the extensive research on handedness

is difficult and complicated.

First, classifying people as strictly left-handed or right-

handed is not quite accurate. People range from being completely

left-handed or completely right-handed to being completely

ambidextrous—that is, able to do many things with either hand,

without a decided preference. Most of us fall somewhere on a

continuum, with about 90 percent of humans preferring, more or

less strongly, the right hand, and 10 percent preferring the left.

The percentage of individuals with left-hand preference for

handwriting seems to be rising, from about 2 percent in 1932 to

about 11 percent in the 1980s. The main reason for this rise is prob-

ably that teachers and parents have learned to tolerate left-

"To make biological survival

possible, Mind at Large has to be

funneled through the reducing

valve of the brain and nervous

system. What comes out the other

end is a measly trickle of the kind

of consciousness which will help us

to stay alive on the surface of this

particular planet. To formulate

and express the contents of this

reduced awareness, man has

invented and endlessly elaborated

those symbol-systems and implicit

philosophies which we call

languages."

— Aldous Huxley

The Doors of Perception

Some famous individuals usually

classified as left-handers:

Charlie Chaplin

Judy Garland

Ted Williams

Robert McNamara

George Burns

Lewis Carroll

King George VI of Britain

W. C. Fields

Albert Einstein

Billy the Kid

Queen Victoria

Harry S. Truman

Casey Stengel

Charlemagne

Paul McCartney

Pharoah Rameses II

Cole Porter

Gerald Ford

Cary Grant

Ringo Starr

Prince Charles

Benjamin Franklin

Julius Caesar

Marilyn Monroe

George Bush

YOUR BRAIN: THE RIGHT AND LEFT OF IT

Mirror writing reverses the shape

of every letter and is written from

right to left—that is, backwards.

Only when held up to a mirror

does it become legible for most

readers:

The most famous mirror-writer in

history is the Italian artist, inven-

tor, and left-hander Leonardo da

Vinci. Another is Lewis Carroll,

left-handed author of Alice's Adven-

tures in Wonderland and its sequel,

Through the tooking-Glass and What

Alice Found There, whose mirror-

written poem is shown above.

Most right-handers find mirror

writing difficult, but it is quite easy

for many left-handers.

Try writing your signature in

mirror writing.

handed writing and no longer force children to use the right

hand. This relatively new tolerance is fortunate, because forcible

change can cause a child to have serious problems, such as stut-

tering, right/left directional confusion, and difficulty in learning

to read.

A useful way to regard handedness is to recognize that hand

preference is the most visible outward sign of how an individual's

brain is organized. There are other outward signs: eyedness

(everyone has a dominant eye, used in sighting along an edge, for

.example) and footedness (the foot used to step off a curb or to

start a dance step). The key reason for not forcing a child to use

the nonpreferred hand is that brain organization is probably

genetically determined, and forcing a change works against this

natural organization. Natural preference is so strong that past

efforts to change left-handers often resulted in ambidexterity:

children capitulated to pressure (in the old days, even punish-

ment) and learned to use the right hand for writing but continued

to use the left for everything else.

Moreover, there is no acceptable reason for teachers or par-

ents to force a change. Reasons proffered run from "Writing with

the left hand looks so uncomfortable," to "The world is set up for

right-handers and my left-handed child would be at a disadvan-

tage." These are not good reasons, and I believe they often mask

an inherent prejudice against left-handedness—a prejudice now

rapidly disappearing, I'm happy to report.

Putting prejudice aside, there are important differences

between left-handers and right-handers. Left-handers are gener-

ally less lateralized than right-handers. Lateralization means the

degree to which specific functions are carried out almost exclu-

sively by one hemisphere. For example, left-handers more fre-

quently process language in both hemispheres and process spatial

information in both hemispheres than do right-handers. Specifi-

cally, language is mediated in the left hemisphere in 90 percent of

right-handers and 70 percent of left-handers. Of the remaining 10

percent of right-handers, about 2 percent have language located

in the right brain, and about 8 percent mediate language in both

hemispheres. Of the remaining 30 percent of left-handers, about

THE NEW DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN

15 percent have language located in the right brain, and about 15

percent mediate language in both hemispheres. Note that indi-

viduals with right-hemisphere language location—termed right-

hemisphere dominance, since language dominates—often write

in the "hooked" position that seems to cause teachers so much

dismay. Scientist Jerre Levy has proposed that hand position in

writing is another outward sign of brain organization.

Do these differences matter? Individuals vary so much that

generalizations are risky. Nevertheless, experts agree in general

that a mixture of functions in both hemispheres (that is, a lesser

degree of lateralization) creates the potential for conflict or inter-

ference. It is true that left-handers statistically are more prone to

stutter and to experience the reading difficulty called dyslexia.

However, other experts suggest that bilateral distribution of func-

tions may produce superior mental abilities. Left-handers excel

in mathematics, music, and chess. And the history of art certainly

gives evidence of an advantage for left-handedness: Leonardo da

Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael were all left-handed.

Aztecs in early Mexico used the

left hand for medicine for kidney

trouble, the right when curing the

liver.

From The Left-Handers' Handbook,

by J. Bliss and J. Morella.

The Incas of ancient Peru

considered left-handedness a sign

of good fortune.

Former United States Vice Presi-

dent Nelson Rockefeller, a changed

left-hander, had difficulty reading

prepared speeches because of a

tendency to read backward from

right to left. The cause of this diffi-

culty may have been his father's

unrelenting effort to change his

son's left-handedness.

"Around the family dinner table, the

elder Mr. Rockefeller would put a

rubber band around his son's left

wrist, tie a long string on it and

jerk the string whenever Nelson

started to eat with his left hand, the

one he naturally favored."

— Quoted in The Left-

Handers' Handbook

by J. Bliss and J. Morella,

1980

Eventually, young Nelson

capitulated and achieved a rather

awkward ambidextrous

compromise, but he suffered the

consequences of his father's

rigidity throughout his lifetime.

Mayan Indians were pro-right:

the twitching of a soothsayer's left

leg foretold disaster.

YOUR BRAIN: THE RIGHT AND LEFT OF IT

A comparison of left-mode and right-mode characteristics

Verbal Using words to name, describe, define.

Nonverbal Using non-verbal cognition to process

perceptions.

Analytic Figuring things out step-by-step and part-

by-part.

Synthetic Putting things together to form wholes.

Symbolic Using a symbol to stand for something. For

example, the drawn form stands for eye,

the sign + stands for the process of addition.

Actual, real Relating to things as they are, at the present

moment.

Abstract Taking out a small bit of information and

using it to represent the whole thing.

Analogic Seeing likenesses among things; understand-

ing metaphoric relationships.

Temporal Keeping track of time, sequencing one thing

after another: Doing first things first, second

things second, etc.

Nontemporal Without a sense of time.

Rational Drawing conclusions based on reason and

facts.

Nonrational Not requiring a basis of reason or facts; will-

ingness to suspend judgment.

Digital Using numbers as in counting. Spatial Seeing where things are in relation to other

things and how parts go together to form a

whole.

Logical Drawing conclusions based on logic: one

thing following another in logical order—

for example, a mathematical theorem or a

well-stated argument.

Intuitive Making leaps of insight, often based on

incomplete patterns, hunches, feelings, or

visual images.

Linear Thinking in terms of linked ideas, one

thought directly following another, often

leading to a convergent conclusion.

Holistic (meaning "wholistic") Seeing whole things

all at once; perceiving the overall patterns

and structures, often leading to divergent

conclusions.

THE NEW DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN

Handedness and drawing

Does left-handedness, then, improve a person's ability to gain

access to right-hemisphere functions such as drawing? From my

observations as a teacher, I can't say that I have noticed much

difference in ease of learning to draw between left- and right-

handers. Drawing came easily to me, for example, and I am

extremely right-handed—though, like many people, I have some

right/left confusion, perhaps indicating bilateral functions. (A

person with right/left confusion is one who says "Turn left,"

while pointing right.) But there is a point to be made here. The

process of learning to draw creates quite a lot of mental conflict.

It's possible that left-handers are more used to that kind of confl-

ict and are therefore better able to cope with the discomfort it

creates than are fully lateralized right-handers. Clearly, much

research is needed in this area.

Some art teachers recommend that right-handers shift the

pencil to the left hand, presumably to have more direct access to

R-mode. I do not agree. The problems with seeing that prevent

individuals from being able to draw do not disappear simply by

changing hands; the drawing is just more awkward. Awkwardness,

I regret to say, is viewed by some art teachers as being more cre-

ative or more interesting. I think this attitude does a disservice to

the student and is demeaning to art itself. We do not view awk-

ward language, for instance, or awkward science as being more

creative and somehow better.

A small percentage of students do discover by trying to draw

with the left hand that they actually draw more proficiently that

way. On questioning, however, it almost always comes to light that

the student has some ambidexterity or was a left-hander who had

been pressured to change. It would not even occur to a true right-

hander like myself (or to a true left-hander) to draw with the less-

used hand. But on the chance that a few of you may discover

some previously hidden ambidexterity, I encourage you to try

both hands at drawing, then settle on whichever hand feels the

most comfortable.

Sigmund Freud, Hermann von

Helmholtz, and the German poet

Schiller were afflicted with

right/left confusion. Freud wrote

to a friend:

"I do not know whether it is obvious

to other people which is their own

or other's right or left. In my case,

I had to think which was my right;

no organic feeling told me. To

make sure which was my right hand

I used quickly to make a few writ-

ing movements."

— Sigmund Freud

The Origins of Psycho-

analysis

A less august personage had the

same problem:

Pooh looked at his two paws. He

knew that one of them was the

right, and he knew that when you

had decided which one of them was

the right, that the other one was

the left, but he never could

remember how to begin. "Well," he

said slowly...

— A. A. Milne

The House at Pooh Corner

YOUR BRAIN: THE RIGHT AND LEFT OF IT

Psychologist Charles T. Tart,

discussing alternate states of

consciousness, has said, "Many

meditative disciplines take the

view that... one possesses (or can

develop) an Observer that is highly

objective with respect to the

ordinary personality. Because it

is an Observer that is essentially

pure attention/awareness, it has

no characteristics of its own."

Professor Tart goes on to say that

some persons who feel that they

have a fairly well-developed

Observer "feel that this Observer

can make essentially continuous

observations not only within a

particular d-SoC (discrete state

of consciousness) but also during

the transition between two or more

discrete states."

— "Putting the Pieces

Together," 1977

In the chapters to follow, I will address the instructions to

right-handers and thus avoid tedious repetition of instructions

specifically for left-handers, with no intention of the "handism"

that left-handers know so well.

Setting up the conditions for the L->R shift

The exercises in the next chapter are specifically designed to

cause a (hypothesized) mental shift from L-mode to R-mode.

The basic assumption of the exercises is that the nature of the

task can influence which mode will "take up" the job while

inhibiting the other hemisphere. But the question is what factors

determine which mode will predominate?

Through studies with animals, split-brain patients, and indi-

viduals with intact brains, scientists believe that the control ques-

tion may be decided mainly in two ways. One way is speed:

Which hemisphere gets to the job the quickest? A second way is

motivation: Which hemisphere cares most or likes the task the

best? And conversely: Which hemisphere cares least and likes the

job the least?

Since drawing a perceived form is largely an R-mode func-

tion, it helps to reduce L-mode interference as much as possible.

The problem is that the left brain is dominant and speedy and is

very prone to rush in with words and symbols, even taking over

jobs which it is not good at. The split brain studies indicated that

dominant L-mode prefers not to relinquish tasks to its mute part-

ner unless it really dislikes the job—either because the job takes

too much time, is too detailed or slow or because the left brain is

simply unable to accomplish the task. That's exactly what we

need—tasks that the dominant left brain will turn down. The

exercises that follow are designed to present the brain with a task

that the left hemisphere either can't or won't do.

THE NEW DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN

And now if e'er by chance I put

My fingers into glue

Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot

Into a left-hand shoe...

— Lewis Carroll

Upon the Lonely Moor, 1856

YOUR BRAIN: THE RIGHT AND LEFT OF IT 47

Crossing Over:

Experiencing the Shift

from Left to Right